Facility and warehouse flooring can really take a beating as the seasons change. Winter brings wet, slushy conditions, along with ice and snow, and leftover salt from the roads and parking lots, often worsened with deliveries, forklift activity, and inventory management. These factors can degrade your flooring, raise repair and replacement costs, and increase safety concerns.

As we look ahead to winter, maintenance managers can prepare for the weather and keep floors looking their best through the season with a few simple steps:

• Concrete floors become very slippery when wet, so ensuring they stay as dry as possible is crucial. Increase your cleaning schedule to account for a greater need during the winter months.
• Staying vigilant in identifying areas where moisture collects can help to create a cleaning schedule that addresses the winter need appropriately.
• Installing matting is a great way to keep entrance areas dry, before it has a chance to travel onto the floors. These can become saturated quickly, though, depending on the volume of traffic, so be sure to change them out, use a wet vac, or dry them for optimal performance.
• Matting can also be placed in areas like work stations to trap any residual snow or ice, helping to eliminate any unwanted pools of water that may be tracked throughout the rest of the facility.
• Consider adding a non-slip coating to high-traffic areas to mitigate the risk of slip and fall accidents once wet weather is unavoidable. These are also available for exterior use, so it may be beneficial to consider areas where deliveries and drop-offs happen most frequently.
• Similarly, protect your loading dock and keep the ice and snow out with an overhead canopy, door seals, and high-volume-low-speed fans to keep the area safe and dry through the winter.
• If you are using automatic scrubbers to keep your floors clean, ensure that you are cleaning them out to minimize the damage that ice melt can have on your equipment.
• Maintaining an optimal temperature in the warehouse can help keep condensation from building up, which can make floors extra slippery. This is a challenge with dock or bay doors opening and closing, so pay strict attention to your heating and cooling to know what temperature best addresses this balance.

Winter weather can cause your warehouse floor to become messy and dangerous, so maintenance managers who prioritize their flooring can increase safety, improve performance, and lengthen the lifespan of their warehouse flooring this winter.